Softpedia >News >Linux >Other Tips, Tricks and Tutorials
Softpedia Homepage   

Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Card Reader under Ubuntu Edgy

How to get your laptop's card reader to work on Ubuntu.

Jan 5, 2007 11:20 GMT  ·  By
  

I've noticed that many people (including myself) had some problems with the card reader from Texas Instruments that comes with their laptop; so after some documentation, I successfully got my card reader to work. I own an Acer TravelMate laptop and my card reader is a Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD). To know what kind of card reader you have, simply open a terminal and type the "lspci" command:

code
marius@marius-laptop:~$ lspci
.......
0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
0a:09.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
This is what "lspci" command outputs, on my Ubuntu Edgy, about the card reader. You should see these lines at the end of the "lspci" command. If you have the same result as I had, you can continue the rest of the guide in order to get your Texas Instruments card reader working.

To test your card reader, open a terminal and type the following commands:

code
sudo modprobe tifm_7xx1
sudo modprobe tifm_core
sudo modprobe tifm_sd
Now insert a card and it should auto mount. If all went well and you see a Nautilus window with the contents of your card, you can make this permanent by editing the /etc/modules file:
code
sudo gedit /etc/modules
and add the following lines:
code
tifm_7xx1
tifm_core
tifm_sd
save and close the file (remember to leave a blank line after the last row).

Now, every time you open your laptop and insert one of the supported multimedia cards, it will be automatically mounted; you'll immediately see an icon on your desktop (named mmcdisk in my case, as I have a microSD card) and a window will open with the contents of your card. Simple enough?

Editor's note: I have also tested this guide on OpenSuSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 5, but unfortunately, it's not working as these distributions don't include the tifm (Texas Instruments Firmware) module into the default kernel.